Zune stops playing current music during Wi-Fi, peer-to-peer music transfer, so you sit there in silence while waiting for the download. While playing music, for example, it's too hard to get to the equalizer to adjust sound quality. Some features are too hard to find and not well designed. Others report crashes of the Marketplace application. Software installation is problematic for some. Why can't I buy a music player without being dragged into a Windows Live membership and forced to use Microsoft's weird Monopoly money? And the whole Microsoft Points thing represents more needless harassment. Like Xbox Live and many other Microsoft consumer media products, the out-of-box experience is ruined by endless screens demanding personal information and Windows Live ID membership. Usability issues.The Zune software installation process needs a lot of work.

Marketplace at deadline had no podcasting section.

You can't, for example, use Marketplace to subscribe to podcasts via RSS and have them automatically show up and sync. It plays movies, but you can't buy them from the Zune Marketplace yet.

Zune doesn't support PlaysForSure, Microsoft's own certification standard for music files, and it is incompatible with common media formats such as DivX, OGG, protected WMV and WMA-DRM9.

Zune software download for mac